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Suppose I wanted to indicate the range of time from exactly 8:00am to exactly 8:30am. Should I write “8:00am” for explicitness, or is exactly 8:00am implied by “8am”?

Also, is “2:15pm–2:45pm”, for example, an acceptable formatting of such a range, or should I be writing it differently?

(I am using am/pm lowercase with no space which I am near certain is correct, along with an en dash with no spacing, which I am pretty sure is a standard way of writing ranges.)

I was perhaps not specific enough in my first iteration of this question. I am mainly interested in meaning and aesthetics as elaborated upon in my reply to a comment hereunder.

tchrist
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Stefan Lapointe
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    Does this answer your question? What's the correct way to format a date range, time range, and days of week in a single line? (covers time ranges in hours in addition to dates etc). The addition of minutes adds a precising element (not logically, but pragmatics-wise: the way language is read, the nuances assumed). 2:15–2:45pm would be read the obvious way. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 07 '20 at 18:03
  • @EdwinAshworth Not really. What I'm most interested in is whether "8am" means exactly 8:00am, or just any time closer to that then 7:00am or 9:00am. Also from the aesthetic perspective, whether or not I should write "8:00am" rather than "8am" if I am going to put "8:30am" right next to it and want to avoid potential clashing. – Stefan Lapointe Sep 07 '20 at 18:15
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    The domain in which you're writing will inform the degrees of accuracy 8:00am and 8am convey. In some circumstances, you'd need to go as far as seconds and even fractions of a second. But 'exactly 8 o'clock' is only meaningful notionally, never in practice. You can only be accurate to say picoseconds. Which is way off exactness. // If you want people not to be a second late, telling them explicitly is better than any non-well–defined convention. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 07 '20 at 18:52
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    There is no single correct way to write times and time ranges. If you are writing for publication, consult the publisher's style sheet. For example, the Guardian style guide uses a dot between hour and minute thus 8am, 8.30am. Some US style rules enforce a colon separator and spaced capitals AM and PM thus 8 AM 8:30 AM, and you may even see 8 A.M. and 8:30 A.M. As we're talking style here, I'd be consistent and use the same convention throughout the text. If you have any times which include minutes, express all times that way, using '00' for on-the-hour times. – Michael Harvey Sep 07 '20 at 18:57
  • @EdwinAshworth Good point about context. I guess I can't expect a notation that has arisen organically to have clear cut implicit meaning. – Stefan Lapointe Sep 07 '20 at 21:50
  • @MichaelHarvey This basically answers my question, thank you! The real world problem that made me finally ask this question is that I'm working on a document to organize all important information about school, and I needed to include time ranges with a mix of on the hour times and hour with minutes times, so I guess, for example, "8:00am–8:30am" is preferable to "8am–8:30am". – Stefan Lapointe Sep 07 '20 at 21:54
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    Could you please explain the context here? Are you asking how to type something—or how to *typeset* it? Where you plan to write this governs how it should be typeset. For example, some publications expect the typeface’s small capitals for ᴀᴍ and ᴘᴍ, letter-spaced not kerned, and the suffix to be separated from the kerned text figures used in running text by a non-breaking thin-space such as you see in “8:35 ᴀᴍ”—for example. A professional typesetter will always do a better job than a million monkeys on typewriters.   ⌨    Or is it for a table, so w/fixed lining figures like 8:35 am? – tchrist Sep 07 '20 at 23:09
  • @tchrist I was asking about typing rather than typesetting, but I appreciate your informative comment. – Stefan Lapointe Sep 08 '20 at 17:19

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@MichaelHarvey provided what I consider to be an answer to my question in the comments:

If you have any times which include minutes, express all times that way, using '00' for on-the-hour times.

This built upon a specification by @EdwinAshworth on how precision is implied:

The domain in which you're writing will inform the degrees of accuracy 8:00am and 8am convey.

So now I know that while "8am" could mean exactly 8:00am, "8:00am" should still be used for the sake of being explicit in contexts where precision is not obviously implied, and/or for the sake of aesthetic consistency.

Stefan Lapointe
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  • Have you considered around 8 o’clock, or around 8 in the morning? How would you say this out loud? – tchrist Sep 07 '20 at 22:43
  • I don't get your second question, but I guess I could use words like "around" to mean that it's not exact in contexts where precision is implied by default – Stefan Lapointe Sep 08 '20 at 17:16